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Early stage firms increasingly use social media to communicate with their target stakeholders, such as customers and investors. In this study, we investigate whether the use of social media is associated with increased success in raising venture capital financing. We argue that social media can improve startup funding success through two channels: 1) enabling investor discovery of potential investment opportunities through reduction of search costs and 2) providing additional information to investors for a better evaluation of the quality of the ventures. Using social media activities on Twitter and venture financing data from CrunchBase, we find that an active social media presence and strong Twitter influence (followers, mentions, impressions, and sentiment) increase the likelihood a startup will close the round, the amount raised, and the breadth of the investor pool. In addition, we find that startup social media activity is associated with more investment from investors with less information channels (e.g., angels) and making less industry specialized investments in particular, consistent with the hypothesis that social media improves an investor's ability to discover potential investments. Also, the effect size of social media is stronger for startups where quality information is less available, such as firms outside geographic venture capital clusters or where later investors do not have network relationships with early investors, consistent with social media acting as an additional information channel to inform startup quality evaluation.

Online privacy is becoming an increasingly important topic, and an increasingly controversial one. The EU is imposing strict limitations on the use of data obtained from its citizens' online activities [9], while Big Data advocates and online advertisers in the United States are concerned that this may represent interference in their basic business models or even in international trade [13].It is clear that laws and regulations are inconsistent across national borders. They are also inconsistent within nations, depending on the industry classification of companies, or even the designation given to specific technologies. ISPs are prohibited from reading subscribers' email; other information services companies can do so legally. Data stored electronically is offered protection that is denied to data stored in the cloud.This paper proposes that regulatory confusion be addressed starting with some basic principles of uniformity. More importantly, it suggests that regulation be driven by what consumers actually want, and provides some preliminary research aimed at determining what consumers want from privacy regulation around the world.

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